Author: Jonathan Witt

The reporter does deserve credit for interviewing Iowa State’s Tom Ingebritsen, associate professor of genetics, who says that, while ID shouldn’t be taught as fact, it isn’t “unreasonable to discuss the subject in a science class” (reporter’s language).

he New York Times published a letter from the president of Discovery Institute, Bruce Chapman, correcting Laurie Goodstein’s piece “Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker.” In addition to the misinformation Chapman notes, the story also passed along an error concerning the Templeton Foundation.

My old college town paper, the Lawrence Journal-World, reports that two new classes at the University of Kansas will work to discredit the theory of intelligent design. One class, taught by religion professor Paul Mirecki, chairman of KU’s religious studies department, was initially titled Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and Other Religious Mythologies. […]

Charles Krauthammer’s syndicated essay against intelligent design ran opposite mine in today’s Seattle Times. The piece is full of problems, which Tom Gilson and Lawrence Seldon explore in loving detail here and here. Now I would have framed a couple of points in their otherwise fine analysis a little differently. In one place,

Each branch of science, they say, has pro-Darwinists who acknowledge that while they assume the other branches of science have more solid evidence for Darwinism, their own branch is lacking in that high level of certainty. In other words, the scientists are in a weird peer pressure, herd mentality loop where they think that the other guy must have the “good stuff.”

In today’s LA Times, Josh Getlin discusses biochemist Michael Behe’s testimony in the Dover trial: “Even some of Behe’s strongest critics believe he may have scored important points in his mid-October court appearance.”

Salzberg also urges readers to “drop the artificial debate about evolution and intelligent design.” But he himself encourages just such an artificial debate, for no design theorist questions microevolution, the sort of change that produces new flu viruses.

“There are people right now in Dover, Pennsylvania fighting to ban a completely harmless book called Of Pandas And People from public school science classes, against the express wishes of a majority of the parents…. You can put all the lipstick you want on this pig, with armwaving generalizations about ‘separation of church and state,’ but the pig won’t get any prettier.” Atheist Dean Esmay

George Neumayr of the American Spectator has a good column about the Dover trial: The ACLU has gone from defending teachers to prosecuting them. In a federal courtroom this week, the ACLU argued that science teachers in the school district of Dover, Pennyslvania, are not free under the Constitution to question evolutionary theory. He discusses […]